TransPerfect Co-CEO Elizabeth Elting and her legal team are now asking New York Supreme Court Judge, Debra James, permission to discontinue Elting’s claims against Co-CEO Philip Shawe.
This comes after the judge made a recent determination that the exchange of discovery would proceed in the New York case, a release from Shawe’s legal counsel stated.
The case arises over the Delaware Chancery Court decision to order the sale of the translation services company. While much of the litigation has been in Delaware, the state where TransPerfect is incorporated, other filings have been made in New York, the stae where the company is headquartered.
Shawe’s attorney Glenn Faegenburg of The Edelsteins, Faegenburg & Brown LLP said, “Elting’s legal team should not be permitted to unilaterally discontinue claims they have already presented and aggressively litigated in New York County Supreme Court, in order to avoid providing discovery regarding those claims.”
“Among Elting’s frivolous claims against Shawe, that she and her legal team now want to drop, are false allegations of defamation, assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” Faegenburg continued. “Absent the court’s permission to withdraw their claims, discovery supporting Shawe’s contention that Elting and her legal team filed a false defamation action against Shawe they knew was untrue will likely be uncovered.”
“Notably, this same tactic was used in the Delaware case where Elting withdrew over 250 allegations from her complaint the day before an expedited trial was to begin. In that case, Shawe alleged that Elting and her lawyers had fraudulently manufactured deadlock to convince the Chancellor to put the company up for sale,” Faegenburg stated.
“My time is important. Mr. Shawe’s time is important. Elting and her lawyers have wasted our collective time litigating non-meritorious claims against Shawe for years. What really disturbs me is that the only reason they are backing out now is because they don’t want the discovery process to expose that they used an e-mail that I myself wrote in an effort to protect both parties, as a basis to file a knowingly false defamation claim against my client,” Faegenburg said. “Now, they want to just snap their fingers and make their prior misdeeds magically vanish without repercussion.”
